


To the Athlete Dying Young

by FranklyFrazzled



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FranklyFrazzled/pseuds/FranklyFrazzled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sixty-three years was such a long time ago, things like touching are easy to forget in the expanse of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the Athlete Dying Young

**Author's Note:**

> Spanish Civil War/ WWII AU

Xabi comes to Steven at night like a bad dream. Although, perhaps he really is just that, a dream. It wouldn’t be the first time he had invaded his night time thoughts and that’s exactly how Steven greets him. 

“I’ve dreamed about you before,” he says and Xabi doesn’t seem the slightest bit phased at the strange beginning of conversation, making it even more likely he really is his subconscious. Yes, that must be it. 

The dream remains quiet while the man doesn’t yet bother to look up. “The very first time was the night after we’d first met. I dreamt about you many times after that.” Steven removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. There was something about becoming old; the way the body that had once withstood everything and anything without complaint soon turned on itself. “Then one night I stopped.” He almost wanted to laugh but didn’t have the energy to try.

Wearily and pained, he turned to the man in the doorway. A soft smile that could easily have been mistaken for a pained grimace appeared on his face. Pain from his rickety, aged body or that of a different, deeper cutting pain of the heart could not be determined. 

“You’re still so young,” he found himself telling the dream. “You haven’t aged a day. Not a single moment.”

“How can I age?” Xabi’s soft, accented voice was quickly absorbed by the room around them, like the walls had been starved for the sound for so long and drank it up as quickly as they could. In reality, they had. 

“People grow old, Xabi. I have.” The real words are left unsaid between them. The words that describe what Steven has had too much of and that the dream was robbed of many unthinkable years ago. “Are you going to stand in the doorway all night?”

“Am I allowed to enter?”

“Have I ever said you couldn’t?”

Blue eyes followed, intensely fixated on the figure of a man as he moved across the room, as if experimenting. “It has changed,” Xabi finally observed, fingering the dusty bookshelf with a slight melancholy in his voice. He seemed too much like a child now with his tight skin, smooth movements, and athletic body. Steven could barely believe that he had been so young when they had known each other. 

He wanted to tell him, “I couldn’t wait for you forever” but he caught those intelligent brown eyes the same way he once had long ago and couldn’t manage it. “It’s been a long time” is what he says instead. 

“How many years?” the Spaniard was next to him now. He cleared all the old papers and files off the only other spare chair in the cluttered office and was so close the smell of the ocean mixed with nutmeg assaulted the old man from his body like a battalion of memories. 

“Too many.”

“Tell me, Steven. How many years did it take to make you like this?” And there it was. Xabi’s hand ghosted over his wrinkled cheek, his eyes staring with such softness into his. “I want to know the number.”

Sixty-three years. Sixty-three long, painful years. He didn’t say it out loud but that’s the joy of a dream. Xabi understood it all. The young man rested his forehead against that of the older man and they both closed their eyes, simply remembering what it was like to touch again. Sixty-three years was such a long time ago, things like touching are easy to forget in the expanse of time. 

It’s now and only now that Steven allows the dream to take him over completely and he remembers. For the first time in years, he remembers everything. 

 

“Ha empezado. Ven. Íker Casillas.”

Steven didn’t need to know Spanish to understand the telegram he’d awoken to instead of his lover, slightly wrinkled and left on his side of the bed like it had been tossed in a hurry. He knew the war was going to happen sooner or later but he’d just hoped he would have had more time to convince Xabi not to go. 

He stared at the name. Íker Casillas. Xabi had mentioned him before when he talked about Spain and those he’d left behind. There had always been a guilty look in his eyes when he spoke and he often cut the nostalgic conversations short, saying it was too strange to talk about home in English. That it was almost disrespectful. 

(Some days Steven would ask him to talk about his home in Spanish. He’d spend hours listening to his lover, wrapped up in bed, speaking in his native language. Somehow, he always knew what he was saying without ever understanding a word. The language of the heart is a universal one that needs no tongue. However, days when he would comply were few and far between.) 

That’s how Steven knew he couldn’t keep Xabi forever right from the very beginning. But knowing didn’t make the betrayal of being left in the middle of the night any less deep. 

There had been something in the air that entire evening. He had felt as though he was running everywhere but never actually moving. He felt as though everything he touched was strangely out of reach, even if it was directly in the middle of his palm. The moon had been full. His mother had always told him to be aware of full moons for the tricks they play on the hearts of men. Emotions are stirred and wars are begun, still, the moon keeps shining on. He made love to Xabi in a desperate frenzy, somehow subconsciously knowing it would be the last time he would ever hold the man. 

When he awoke, everything was still. It felt as though the entire world had begun again and the years previous were wiped clean. The light from the moon shined strongly through the window, leading an elegant path towards the empty portion of his bed. His forehead crinkled, seeing the foreign piece of paper that Xabi had abandoned there. 

“Ha empezado. Ven. Íker Casillas.”

The world which had begun was one without Xabi. Steven Gerrard had never cried over any man but his heart certainly bled for one. 

 

The world had become a dangerous place. The only true safe place left was America for her people’s refusal to see their nation in any other way. Maybe they had been right in that aspect, that if you pretend long enough it becomes true. Of course in 1944 Americans learned that pretending can’t last forever and they set out for battle but none of this really matters because by 1944 Xabi had already been dead for five years. 

Pretending hadn’t saved his life and Steven quickly picked up his own gun. He wasn’t fighting the same war but it didn’t matter so long as he was fighting. Shock makes people take up arms without care to who they are fighting. (Xabi’s war had meant something. It meant protecting those he’d left behind and keeping his home pure. Steven’s was to kill the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. Without Xabi, he had no home.)

 

“My name’s Steven Gerrard, welcome to Liverpool.” A young man offers his hand to an even younger one. 

“Xabier Alonso.” Their palms fit together, fingers experimented with grip. 

“What brings you to the greatest city on Earth?” Steven watches carefully as the Spaniard doesn’t even think twice about the claim or even dare to challenge it. Other boys off the boats tell him to fuck off; there was no greater place than wherever they were fleeing. (But that’s exactly how Steven knew Liverpool was the best city in the world, because all those people were always leaving and coming here. They never stopped coming and he never left.)

Xabier doesn’t answer his question. Not that day or the next. He does tell him though, one day when the last two letters are dropped off his name and it changes completely into something Steven can’t live without. 

Xabi tells him the first morning they wake up to each other and they are both overcome with a childish happiness that won’t go away. It’s the happiness that momentarily clouds his judgment, without which, he would never have told. “I came to Liverpool to escape. Where I come from, it is too easy to feel too much. When you hurt, it hurts unbearably. When you are happy, the joy is so great it suffocates. I needed to escape the feeling.”

Steven found himself snorting a little but those sad eyes which had taken a short vacation in the period of their love making for the first time since he’d known them made him regret it. Xabi slipped out of bed, readying himself to leave. 

“Wait a second! I didn’t mean it like that, I swear.” Steven paused, waited. He grabbed Xabi’s hand and kissed it gently in apology. “I just meant, that’s how I feel about you, when I’m with you. You make me feel like there’s so much going on inside me that I never knew could be so intense.”

“One day you are going to want to escape from me.” It’s not a question but he wishes it was. 

“Never. Fuck, I couldn’t. I think I- I think I love you.”

“Promise?”

“On Liverpool herself. On fucking España if you want.”

Both are destroyed in the wars that come and Xabi was right. There was nothing Steven wanted more than to escape the man he loved. The hurt was simply too much for him to bear so he packed him into a box and left it under lock and key. He forced himself to forget until a dream betrays him and he is too old to fight it off. 

 

Quierdo Señor Steven Gerrard,  
Somos arrepentidos te decir que Xabier Alonso Olano ha muerto-

Steven received seventy five letters from Spain before the one he was unable to finish and then one after. 

Xabi wrote to him no less than three pages, making it at least 225 pages covered carefully with ink to reach him. Never once did he mention the horrors of war that surrounded him despite the obvious blood that would sometimes appear on the envelopes. Instead, he wrote about the breeze and color of the sky. He wrote about the people he met, was reunited with, saved, and was saved by. 

He was trying to get Steven to forgive him by showing him he was doing good in the world and hadn’t left for nothing. He wrote to him about how he missed the rain and always being cold along with the person who had always warmed him up. Most of all, he wrote about what things would be like when he got back. 

Íker sent him a letter a month or so after it happened. It was unexpected and unwelcome. It’s what made it real.

To Mr. Steven Gerrard,  
I write to you to fulfill Xabi’s last wishes. It has taken me a long time to decide whether or not I should do as he asked of me. You may not know of me but he told me about you. He told me how much he loved you and you him. Still, I never once saw a response to any one of his letters from you. You abandoned him and he still died with your name on his lips.  
I loved him. Not the same way he loved you but love all the same. I thought he was coming back for good and had given up on his foolish dreams of England when he came back to fight for us. I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong.  
He told me love and life no longer existed for him in Spanish and that they could only be English words now for them not to be lies. He had every opportunity to change his mind but he held true to you much more than you deserve.  
I was the one who held him when he was dying. He begged me to let you know, somehow, how sorry he was for leaving you and not being able to return. He begged for your forgiveness but in this letter, I cannot bring myself to ask you for it.  
Instead, I tell you to ask forgiveness from him. He sent you a letter every week no matter where we were or how bad everything around us was. He always managed, even when there was a shortage of paper. For someone who claimed to care for him so, you left him in the dark and to die without peace in his heart. 

Steven read the final letter and placed it with the others, perfectly aligned to fill one half of his made bed. He went to work at the docks, sweated and bled for the right to live, then came home and stared at them all. He decided that the day all the paper would be able to replace Xabi in his heart would be the day he would be ready to forgive him. 

 

“Are you upset with me?” Steven asked, whispered to the dream. Xabi shook his sad, young face slowly. 

“I could never. Especially not now that we are finally together again.”

“Are we? Together for good?” Steven asked, his eyes imploring the dream who smiled softly in response and took his hand in his. Steven looked down at the mismatched hands, one wrinkled with age while the other firm and youthful, with disgust at himself. 

“You’re beautiful,” Xabi said, distracting him from the pain of age. “Always.” He stood up and moved towards the door to leave. 

A panic filled Steven, fearing that this would be just like the dreams of old where he would wake up all alone in the world. He sprang to his feet and was surprised not to experience his body’s screaming protests at being jostled so. 

Every step towards Xabi became easier and more care-free than the last. The dream, although now he’d changed his mind, now maybe he was an angel instead, smiled at him from the doorway and offered his hand once more. There was no hesitation; Steven took it with all the love and determination in his soul. 

A bright light surrounded them but they could only see each other. 

“I love you. Forever.”


End file.
